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The secret to winning local elections (races like school board, water board, city council and mayor) doesn’t necessarily have to do with the message you focus on, the color of your campaign yard signs or even fundraising efforts. It’s nothing as complex as that; in fact, it’s very simple.

To win a local election you need to: reach a likely voter more times than your opponent.

The secret to winning political elections (races for office like school board, water board, city council and mayor) doesn’t have to do with the message you focus on, the color of your political campaign flyers or even fundraising efforts. It has everything to do with maximizing your voter outreach efforts. How many personalized letters, emails, event invites are being sent out and in this day and age how is all of this being tracked and analyzed?

Whether you want to invite females in your database to a Women's Empowerment Conference or ask all males to fill out a survey. If you are running a political campaign you may want to know how many Female Voters there are compared to Male Voters.

Your CRM allows you to represent connections between contacts by creating relationships. For example, if a mother and son are both in your database, it can be useful to be able to look at either record and see that they are related to each other.

Activities are a key concept in your CRM, providing a unified place to record and view the history of interactions between your organization and you constituents, clients and partners. You can you them use them to track meetings, phone calls and other activities that you set up. Activities are also used by all of your components to record things like when contributions are made, when people come to events, sign petitions, etc.

Smart groups are "saved searches." They are useful for keeping track of groups of contacts meeting certain criteria, for example "all members based in Europe." Creating a smart group is easy: you search based on your desired criteria and then choose 'Create smart group'. Once the smart group is created, each time you ask to see the contacts in a group, your CRM will carry out a search and show you contacts that meet the criteria you specified.

This article introduces contacts: the basic building block of your CRM. We look at how to find, view, add, edit and delete contacts. We also look at ways to extend and customize contacts, and to change the way that contacts appear in the user interface.